Northern Virginia residents, plan to be prepared! Much like Winter Storm Jonas, disasters can disrupt hundreds of thousands of lives every year. Now is a great time to sit down and make a plan while you’re at home. Visit ReadyNOVA.org to make a preparedness plan for you, your family, your business, or your faith community.

The Virginia Department of Emergency Management (VDEM) has awarded about $6.5 million in federal funds for 100 projects to enhance emergency preparedness and security throughout the commonwealth, officials announced Jan. 13.

Fairfax County will receive $9,100 for training and/or equipment for its Citizen Corps program; $63,000 for advanced technical training for its hazardous-materials response team; $200,000 for its incidents-management team; $150,000 from the statewide strategic reserve for the county’s radio cache; and $75,000 for equipment for its technical-rescue team.

Thirty-one staffers from the District’s water utility and other city agencies had a problem: Residents had begun reporting that their water smelled of petroleum, signaling possible contamination in part of the city’s drinking water supply.

The scenario was purely theoretical, but the large conference room at D.C. Water’s Bryant Street Pumping Station in Northwest Washington began buzzing with questions.

“Where were the calls from?” one D.C. Water staffer asked. “What’s the current message out to the public?” asked another.

As the first of this year’s El Niño storms hits California, the state’s biggest city has launched a map to keep citizens up to date and help guide them to resources they might need in case of flooding.

The City of Los Angeles Information Technology Agency’s “El Niño Watch” website shows users a map of the county, including a layer showing rainfall severity and pins that show where residents can find sandbags, shelter, hardware stores and other resources. The map also lets users know the status of power outages and shows traffic alerts.

(TNS) - They are the people who roll out of bed at 3 a.m. when you smell smoke. They show up when you crash your car. They also come when you suspect a burglar.
They're the first responders.

First responders have become so important that the state Senate unanimously adopted a resolution designating Jan. 1 through 8, 2016, as "First Responder Appreciation Week" in Pennsylvania.

A Virginia Tech graduate student’s mobile app is offering the potential to improve driver safety and save time, and had its first major test along congested portions of Interstate 66.

As part of a Connected Vehicle-Infrastructure University Transportation Center project, Kayla Sykes – a master’s-degree candidate in the College of Engineering – worked with the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute’s Center for Technology Development to develop and test the app, which informs participants of speed limits, HOV-lane information, lane availability and traffic data.

(TNS) - On a late October day, Fairfield police, firefighters, and members of the local branch of American Medical Response ran a drill at the Fairfield Public Schools, testing everyone on how they’d respond if there was a shooting at one of the schools.

“The call started out as a benign dumpster fire, then it turned out that was just a distraction, and it was actually an active shooter,” Bill Schietinger, general manager of AMR Fairfield County operations, said of the drill.

The National Guard Bureau will deploy 13 new cyber protection teams composed of about 500 soldiers across the nation to help protect the network infrastructure, the military arm announced Dec. 9.